Carbide Tipped Pens

by Ben Bova

  “Thank you for your time,” she said, at last. “We’ll be back.”

  “I have no doubt.” His voice was light, ironic, and for a moment, the smile he turned toward her was that of a much older, much embittered man. He looked at Huong Giang again, and said, “Have you used it?”

  Huong Giang’s face was frozen in what might have been shock, what might have been horror. “You know I haven’t. You know I can’t trust you.”

  “You can’t trust me to be Simalli Fargeau?”

  “I can’t trust you at all,” Huong Giang said.

  “I see.” He looked … ill at ease again. Guilty, Kieu’s gut said, though she had the feeling she was still missing layers and layers of meaning. “You have to use it, elder aunt. It’s the only reason I came here.”

  “I’ll think on it.” Huong Giang’s voice was tense; her hands clenched in her lap.

  Outside—to her horror—The Sea and Mulberry turned to Huong Giang. “You seem troubled.”

  Huong Giang gave a short bark of laughter. “I hadn’t expected him to come back.”

  “You don’t know if it’s him,” The Sea and Mulberry said.

  “No. You’re right. I don’t.” Huong Giang looked at her hand again.

  Kieu said, “What did he mean by, ‘Have you used it?’”

  Huong Giang didn’t answer. The Sea and Mulberry said, “Younger sister, I don’t think we should probe into what doesn’t concern us…”

  “It concerns us. It’s an authentication problem, and we already have little to go on. It could turn out to be significant—could be the detail that invalidates our model. Everything, even your dirty little secrets, elder aunt.” It was … not quite true, of course. What Kieu looked for was multiple, robust correlations; while details like those might be important, they were unlikely to call everything into question. But still … It was a matter of trust and openness, things Huong Giang was unwilling and incapable of granting to her.

  Huong Giang’s voice was low, defiant. “I don’t need to explain myself to you. It’s something that was once given to him for safekeeping.”

  “And that he left with.” The Sea and Mulberry’s voice was very soft.

  “Yes. And returned with. Except that I need to be sure it’s the right one. Are you happy now?”

  Yes. No. It was none of her business, and it helped little. But demons take her if she allowed Huong Giang to see her flustered. “It’s … adequate. We’ll have an answer for you in a few hours’ time.”

  She already knew what it would be, and she also knew what The Sea and Mulberry would say. He knew enough, and behaved enough like Simalli Fargeau to make a positive authentication—within an acceptable margin of tolerance, he really was the man who’d left Huong Giang eighteen years ago, and whatever dirty secret he’d given her was genuine.

  She’d tell Huong Giang that. And then she’d leave—she’d return to the capital with one more authentication to her name, one more payment to her account—one step closer to leaving Tai Menh and all its outmoded customs behind her.

  * * *

  Huong Giang stared at the numbers in front of her—spinning in the hollow of her hand, almost pretty enough to be a work of art.

  And, in a way, it had been one. No one else but Vu could have encoded the key-fragments—no one else could have sealed away their memories with such exquisite care, taking away only what was needed to make them safe. No one else could have made the encryption robust enough to survive losses, including their own.

  Huong Giang hardly remembered Vu now: he was in some of her fainter memories, pouring rice wine on warm afternoons—a safe, government-approved version that she knew bore no resemblance to Vu’s true self. With the same care that he’d crafted the key-fragments, Vu had removed himself from the minds of the Poetry Circle, and almost nothing true was left of him now. Just a few, faint nudges, the same ones that had led Huong Giang to find the rest of the Poetry Circle after the purges; to stare at friends across a wide room, wondering what could have linked them together so tightly, so intimately; and feeling a huge, crushing sense of loss rising in her, an enormous, gaping emptiness that could find no surcease.

  The key. It might be the right one; it might give them back everything they had lost—their memories, the communion of purpose that had given them such joy and pride. Or it might destroy them, more thoroughly than the government had ever done.

  A noise made her look up: Thoi had entered the room, sliding the door shut behind him—and after him, silently, the rest of the Poetry Circle followed.

  They were small and diminished—nothing like the eager youths they had once been—when the world had still been wide open and they’d still believed in the goodness of the government, in the glory of uncensored freedom.

  On all of them, the purges had left their mark. Thoi always took young, unbroken bodies and used them with reckless abandon; Hai walked hunched over and bowed; and, no matter what body she was in, Loan’s left hand would curl in the shape of a claw, even though none of her new bodies had had their fingers broken in vises. And, of course, Thanh Ha and Vu were no longer with them—vanished altogether, frozen in the authentication system, their faces kept forever young and smiling, and all their contracts and secrets forever broken.

  Hai paused when he saw the numbers spinning on Huong Giang’s hand. “So it is true, then. He’s come back.”

  Huong Giang nodded.

  “I don’t see him here,” Loan whispered, her voice rasping against the confines of her throat.

  Huong Giang shook her head. “He does not belong here.” Not yet. Not ever. The Buddha preached forgiveness and compassion, but He also knew that every act found its reward or punishment in another life. He also knew that betrayers would not reincarnate into arhats or bodhisattvas, that a slow ladder had to be climbed in order to reach the bliss of Nirvana.

  “You’re right. He doesn’t belong here.” Thoi’s youthful face was severe.

  “No matter,” Hai said, shaking his head. “This isn’t what we came for.”

  One by one, they laid their hands on Huong Giang’s, and gave her back their key-fragment—each passage altered the numbers subtly, changing the intensity of the light in her palm until it had gone completely dim.

  “Now,” Hai whispered.

  Yes. Now. Huong Giang held her hand over the memory-projection console, and let the gathered key slide into it—and felt it slip away from her grasp into the system, and from the system into their minds—slowly scattering into a thousand component fragments as it started to decrypt what they had encoded eighteen years ago—everything slowly unraveling, coalescing into new, strange shapes.

  The room went dark, as it had, all those years ago, and the contents Vu had sealed away opened up, blossoming like lotus flowers in windswept ponds—all the locked memories of their time spent together, the smell of lemongrass, the sound of each other’s laughter, their excitement at gathering new evidence from Tai Menh’s precolonial history—and then their minds, stumblingly, reached for each other the way they had used to do, and their communion swept outward, scattering images and emotional imprints across the walls, creating a cocoon of dancing light that lifted them into its embrace.

  It wasn’t text, or stims, or anything that tangible that they had found, searching through what their ancestors had left them—rather, it was a slow unfurling of colors on the walls, a rising tide of sounds that carried them with it, until they could hear at the back a chant like the sutras of the monks in the temples, a series of words hovering just at the cusp of hearing like half-remembered dreams, images burnt into their brains—processions of sleek metal ships bringing offerings to huge altars, orbitals gleaming in the background as people laughed and shared warm wine—and through it all ran the same thread of wordless sounds, of songs limned in moonlight and morning mists, of boats cruising on wide, green rivers that turned out to be nothing but the eye of a jade Buddha statue, and then the scene panned out and revealed that the Buddha Himself was carv
ed out from the rock of a huge cliff …

  This was what neither the purges nor the government, nor the Galactics could ever take away: that Tai Menh had been great once, and would be great again.

  Huong Giang took a deep breath—it was all they’d lost, and more—the memories of all their ancestors held together by the gossamer-thin engrams of their minds, showing them the old days as they had really been and not the shambled pretense of ruins the Galactics had shown them and to which the government still clung. It made it all worthwhile.

  She remembered Simalli then, with merciless clarity—the way he’d sat and fidgeted during those sessions—he’d enjoyed the intoxicating rush of sensations, but he had never truly understood any of it. He had never wished to become part of his wife’s world—of their world; had been content with his ability to live like a king on a planet where everything was still designed to accommodate his kind.

  And she saw, then—that this was the man she remembered; not the remorseful illusion in the audience room, not the worried, concerned friend who’d pressed the key-fragment in her hand. She saw that whoever the man was, he was unlikely to be, to ever have been Simalli Fargeau.

  But the key-fragment was genuine. Surely that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else—surely …

  She wasn’t sure what made her break the communion—a breath, perhaps, the scrape of arrested flight? The room was darker now, only lit by the slow dance of the memories they were immersing themselves into, but she caught a fleeting glimpse of Kieu, and of the utter shock on the younger woman’s face as she turned away and fled into the corridors of Celestial Spires.

  * * *

  No matter what she did, Kieu couldn’t shake out the images. She’d only stolen a glimpse of them—hoping to mock Huong Giang with her useless secrets—but now they wouldn’t leave her.

  She’d meant to pack; to take her things and go back to her work, to count the authentications left to her until she had enough money to go off-world. That was what she’d thought, before she’d seen.

  Now she sat in the darkness, with the silent The Sea and Mulberry by her side; and still heard the wordless poems, still saw the reddish glow of the moon cast across the roofs of a temple complex.

  She’d been confident that the Galactics were right and that Tai Menh was nothing but a backward hole, worth only escaping from. She’d read all about the glory days, but until now she’d never seen them—had never experienced them from the inside, from the point of view of her ancestors.

  She felt … held together, comforted in a way she hadn’t been since her mother had died. She felt … part of something greater.

  “Kieu?” The Sea and Mulberry asked.

  Kieu closed her eyes, following the curve of a dragon’s serpentine body; the splash of water as a mindship emerged from the water and opened his gates to welcome his mother aboard; felt the mother’s pride at her son’s achievements; felt the pain as the Galactics tore down Celestial Spires, making way for progress, for larger spaceships with larger berths, and doing away with the old superstitions that held the Rong back from joining the society of their peers …

  “Kieu!”

  With difficulty, she tore herself away from the images in her brain; though she still heard the wordless song, like a memory of the old poems her mother had once sung to her, in a time both infinitely far away and infinitely close by. “What is it?”

  “I worry about you,” The Sea and Mulberry said, a bit stiffly. “You haven’t moved for four hours.”

  “Oh. Haven’t I? I’m sorry. You’re right. We need to pack.” She moved back to the bed where her things lay spread out, and stared at them for a moment—they seemed tawdry and unfamiliar, like the fragments of a broken vase.

  “You’re not listening,” The Sea and Mulberry’s voice was gentle.

  “No,” Kieu said. Ancestors help her, she wasn’t. “I’m really sorry. What were you saying?”

  “I … I need your advice.” The mindship hovered over the table, projecting a blue beam of light under his hologram. “I’ve been reviewing the correlation matrices for the authentication of Simalli Fargeau.”

  Kieu’s heart seemed to freeze in her chest. “You said you agreed with me when I said it had to be him.”

  “Within the tolerance bounds of the constructed a priori and a posteriori models and the observation data,” the Sea and Mulberry said.

  “And you’re saying the models are wrong? We can’t go back on an authentication.” She’d given her word to Huong Giang; had given the Identity Keepers’ word. They’d been sure; as sure as they could be with what they’d seen. And Huong Giang had seemed so sure, too. He knew too much and behaved too much like Simalli. It had to be him.

  “No…” The Sea and Mulberry paused. “There are … outliers in the observations. Little things…”

  “Show me,” Kieu said, sitting down on the bed amidst her scattered belongings.

  Images scrolled across her field of vision—not the glorious sights of Huong Giang’s secrets, but simply the recordings of The Sea and Mulberry—and her own recordings, interspersed with her notes.

  “Lack of anger, for one thing,” The Sea and Mulberry said. “His sense of shame was also off the scales; I attributed this to the pain of returning, but once you dug into it…”

  Gently, carefully, he teased apart the events, showing her how the parametric probability density models and loss functions they’d put together didn’t quite converge; the higher-order pattern in the outlier data, and how integrating the outliers added up to a wholly different behavioral distribution; how the reactions of the man who pretended himself Simalli Fargeau could be interpreted in an entirely different way.

  “Do you see, now?”

  She saw … she saw that even with the most tolerant model they could build, the faults were too many, too omnipresent. She saw that she’d been in a hurry to leave Celestial Spires and had botched the job. “I see.”

  “I don’t know what it means,” The Sea and Mulberry said. “After all, eighteen years is a long time…”

  A long time, yes—and so much of it spent in an alien culture without records. Kieu zoomed in on their first interview with him, watching him rise as they entered the room—watched the minute, complicated movement he’d made: a reaching forward with one hand, swiftly withdrawn; a tensing of the hands to bring them together for a Rong greeting; and then he’d stopped, and reached forward again, shaking Kieu’s hand as if nothing had been wrong. It was small and almost undetectable, but Kieu had been trained to notice such inconsistencies. Simalli Fargeau had always shaken hands without hesitation; why would he have that brief impulse to greet them in the Rong faction and then change his mind? Unless …

  Slowly, she called up the first optical-stims—the ones that showed Simalli with Pham Thi Dao—and watched them together for a while, trying to piece the data back together into a new model.

  “I see,” she said, slowly. “I see.”

  She could shut The Sea and Mulberry up. It would be so easy—he hated conflict and would bow down to her superior expertise, all too glad to leave an orbital where he felt as ill at ease as her. She could leave, now, with Huong Giang none the wiser—and have her reputation intact.

  She could …

  In her mind, she saw the slender shape of a pagoda, stretching toward the Heavens; listened again to a wordless song; to words she hadn’t heard for years and cherished without knowing it—and knew that her wish to leave Tai Menh had been nothing but the act of running away from painful ghosts; that she was Rong, would always be Rong with those words within her; and that Celestial Spires had been and would always be the only place she could call home.

  “Fine. Let’s go,” she said.

  * * *

  Huong Giang found Simalli in the common room—carelessly sitting on the table, his legs crossed—everything in him like a spring wound tight.

  She said, without preamble, “You’re not Simalli. You’re not Galactic.”

  “I s
ee. And what do you base this on? Your authenticator Kieu declared me a suitable match.”

  He sounded … so sure of himself, so casually in charge, that Huong Giang hesitated—surely Kieu had to be right about him? “Because,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended, “Simalli Fargeau wouldn’t have come back. He was a dilettante, a man who enjoyed the thrill of being with us, but he never could stand danger. He ran away, and he kept running away from us for eighteen years.”

  “Does it matter who I am?” his voice was very low, his gaze fixed on the holos on the wall. “I brought you back the key-fragment, didn’t I?”

  “You did,” Huong Giang said, slowly—feeling again and again the memories swirl within her, her pride in her people, in her ancestors. “I thought you came here for forgiveness; but you have nothing that needs to be forgiven.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I don’t think so, Dao.”

  Simalli gave a short, bitter laugh. “Is that who you think I am? Dao is dead.” He rose, slowly; moved toward the door. “But you’re right about one thing: I didn’t come here for forgiveness. What Simalli Fargeau has done can never be forgiven. I came here because it was the right thing to do—the one thing I believed in. I have done what I needed to do; I’ll be gone now.”

  “Wait,” Huong Giang said. “Wait. Tell me—” She reached for him, but he’d already slid out of her grasp, striding toward the door—and stopped, for Kieu was waiting for him in the doorway, and behind her was the smaller shape of The Sea and Mulberry, blocking his way out.

  How—how had she come here? How—

  Kieu’s face was grim. “Elder aunt. I apologize. I wish to withdraw my authentication. This man isn’t Simalli Fargeau.”

  She closed her eyes and lowered her head, suspicion at last coalescing to certainty. “I thought it might be the case, but…”